Figure 1: Sarah (in black) and Anna (in purple) at Abrahamic Family House

As friends and fellow sociolinguists, we, Anna and Sarah, have discussed almost every topic under the sun (literally!) on our balmy afternoon walks in our home/second home of Abu Dhabi. However, one topic we hadn’t discussed until recently was languages used within religions. Our visit to the Abrahamic Family House on Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island changed this (Figure 1).

Linguistic and semiotic harmony across religions

It’s not often that you see Arabic, Hebrew and English represented together in the same space, but that’s exactly what the Abrahamic Family House does. This cultural and religious centre contains a mosque, synagogue and church as places of worship, linked together by ‘the Forum’, a secular and yet multi-faith connecting space or third space. One of the first features you are drawn towards is the Forum’s water fountain, which highlights the importance of water as a symbol of purity and ablution in Islam, Christianity and Judaism.

Figure 2: Trilingual signage at Abrahamic Family House (picture taken by authors)

All the top-down permanent signage in the Abrahamic Family House is trilingual (Arabic, English, Hebrew), and produced in such a way that the languages are equal in size and are represented on an even footing (Figure 2), with order of languages being alphabetical. This ethos mirrors the design of the mosque, church and synagogue themselves, which are represented equitably – with each building being a 30m x 30m square (Figure 3).

The numerological landscape also holds meaning in this space, with the number seven being significant in all three religions, and therefore represented in the architecture. The gardens add another dimension to the semiotic landscape, within serene courtyards dotted throughout as well as the central raised garden which links all three houses of worship. Here, olive trees are significant in all three religions and are planted throughout, again symbolizing the collective and shared history of the faiths, and with regional trees and plants also indicating the shared regional origin of all three religions.

Language choices for religious signs

Figure 3: The church, mosque and synagogue at the Abrahamic Family House (pictures taken by authors)

As we headed back to the Forum from the gardens, we witnessed an interesting lingua-cultural turn in relation to the signage in one of the darkened rooms. Each corner of the room was lit up in turn by a gobo, with a crescent representing Islam, a cross for Christianity, and a menorah symbolizing Judaism (Figure 4).

Where the crescent was, a verse from the Holy Quran was printed in English and Hebrew only (not Arabic), while where the cross was, a verse from the New Testament in the Bible was printed in Hebrew and Arabic. By the menorah, a verse from the Holy Torah was printed in Arabic and English, and not Hebrew. Some very interesting linguistic choices were made in this room. Here, the emphasis is on sharing values across linguistic groups. Multilingual linguistic landscapes here serve as a pedagogical tool for learning not only about languages, but in this case, religions too.

Abandonment of trilingual values on bottom-up and temporary signage

Figure 4: Religious gobos in the Forum (pictures taken by authors)

When looking at the temporary and bottom-up signage in the space, however, trilingual patterns wavered. For example, if you wanted to attend a sign language course which was being offered as part of the community outreach program, the story told was in Arabic and English, and not Hebrew. In the gift shop, while the main signage was in all three languages, the descriptions of the items were given in English only. Similarly, if you wanted to borrow an abaya to follow the dress code, the directions were given in English only. This reminds us of similar patterns found in Covid-scapes in Abu Dhabi, where bottom-up temporary signage tended to be in English only, in an otherwise bilingual linguistic landscape. Furthermore, the digital linguistic landscape seen via the website of the Abrahamic Family House, is bilingual (English and Arabic), with Hebrew not being a language option. Here, we see, as in other multilingual global contexts such as Canada, trilingual efforts are imbalanced across spaces.

The wall of intentions

Figure 5: Multilingual wall of intentions (picture taken by authors)

Having explored the three places of worship and experienced the immersive light show (Figure 4), we came across a wall of tessellating triangles, again speaking to the significance of the number three: three languages, three religions, and echoing the shape of the simple triangular fountains found throughout the complex. We quickly realized that the purpose of this ‘wall of intentions’ was for visitors to write their own messages of intention. From 120 messages on the wall, we could understand the 60 messages written in English, eight in French, five in German, four in Spanish and one in Italian. A further six were written in Arabic, 25 in East Asian languages, and 18 others which we have yet to fully translate. Pictures appeared on 24 of the messages in addition to text, with only one intention including a picture without words, which was three people holding hands together, symbolizing togetherness.

Of the 78 intentions we could understand, 11 of them referred to God and only one indicated a prayer of any kind. Love was mentioned in 24 intentions, sometimes more than once to emphasize it. Peace was mentioned in 22 intentions. Other sentiments expressed included luck (five times) and happiness (seven times). Intentions were sometimes made in general, other times for oneself, for example ‘to be stress-free’, while sometimes they were made for the world (ten times), and for family in general or specific family members (12 times) (Figure 5).

Figure 6: Our intention for further research (picture taken by authors)

Although the wall of intentions is temporary with today’s intentions being different from tomorrow’s, a major takeaway on the day we visited, October 21, 2024, was the focus on love, peace, the world, and family, rather than on religion itself. There is no doubt that further analysis which includes specific and detailed translations will reveal more nuanced truths, but that’s for another day. Suffice to say that there is a lot to get excited about in this multi-faith, multilingual and interculturally rich space. As our hand-written intention states (Figure 6), we plan to delve deeper into this rich landscape and add to the growing research on religious linguistic landscapes and semiotic religious landscapes in the Arab Gulf States and beyond.

Author bios:

Anna Dillon is an Associate Professor at Emirates College for Advanced Education in Abu Dhabi. She is a teacher educator in the UAE, and has research interests in early childhood education, teacher education, language and literacy education, multilingualism and translingualism in education and within families.

Sarah Hopkyns is a Lecturer at the University of St Andrews and a visiting research fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. Her research interests include language and identity, language policy and linguistic landscapes. Sarah is author of The Impact of Global English on Cultural Identities in the UAE (Routledge, 2020) and co-editor of Linguistic Identities in the Arab Gulf States (Routledge, 2022).

The 3-Minute Thesis (3MT) competition is an opportunity for higher degree research students to present their research in 3 minutes. Normally, symposiums, conferences and seminars are some of the ways research students get to talk about their research. Unlike those presentation formats, the 3MT poses a unique challenge – an entire thesis has to be presented within 3 minutes and not a second over!

This year, the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia (ALAA) held its 3MT competition on 27^th September, 2024 and Tazin Abdullah won first prize. She presented on her research on the Linguistic Landscape of Australian mosques titled “Observe overall cleanliness and sound mannerisms at all times!” – Regulating Australian Muslims in mosques and Islamic prayer spaces.

Tazin’s study examined regulatory signs from Australian mosques that gave readers instructions and stated prohibitions regarding behaviour in these places. What do these signs say about the communication practices within Australian Muslim prayer spaces? What languages do these signs use to communicate with readers? What linguistic and visual strategies do they employ to present rules and regulations?

Reference

Abdullah, Tazin. 2024. “Observe overall cleanliness and sound mannerisms at all times!” – Regulating Australian Muslims in mosques and Islamic prayer spaces. (MRes), Macquarie University.

Other 3MT videos by members of the Language on the Move team

• Brynn Quick, Curing Confusion
• Pia Tenedero, Communicating globally while working remotely

For some images of Ibrar’s work, check out the Sino-Muslim Literacies Project.

If you enjoy the show, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Related content

Ma, Y. (2020). Empowerment of Chinese Muslim women through Arabic? Language on the Move

Akhmedova, M., & Ahmad, R. (2024). Why Are Uzbek Youth Learning Arabic? Language on the Move

Yasser S. Khan and Rizwan Ahmad

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The offending dress (Image credit: BBC)

Recently, a woman in Lahore was accused of blasphemy for wearing a dress printed with Arabic calligraphy. The crowd had assumed that the sartorial motifs must be verses from the Qur’an.

In reality, the words on the dress were hayah and hulwah meaning ‘life’ and ‘sweet’ respectively. Islamic scholars had to be called in to verify this to eventually disband the crowd.

How did the misunderstanding come about?

The calligraphic style of the print on the dress loosely resembles the Thuluth style of writing. Thuluth literally means “a third,” referring to its compactness, as this style of writing occupies a third of the space in comparison to other more expansive Arabic calligraphic styles.

The Thuluth style is most notably visible on Kiswah, the black fabric that covers the Kaaba with verses from the Qur’an. The iconicity of the Kaaba, being one of the most well-known symbols within Islam alongside the crescent moon, extends to the black cloth that covers and adorns it in golden inscriptions of Qur’anic verses , which makes the association of the Thuluth form of writing with Qur’anic verse even stronger.

Generally, Muslims in Pakistan and the Subcontinent at large are able to read Quranic Arabic, even as they might not understand it; recognizing the script is distinct from comprehending it. Considering their familiarity with the Quranic script and the iconic visibility of the Kiswah, the crowd in Pakistan recognized the Thuluth form of Arabic writing on the dress, which to them is blasphemous as it is perceived as an irreverent treatment of sacred Qur’anic verses.

For the crowd, it was the form of the writing that evoked the sacredness associated with the Qur’an which they mistakenly associated with the content of the writing. If the dress had been printed with Urdu words (in which case the crowd would have known the content) or even perhaps Arabic words in another font, the misrecognition would not have arisen.

Using the sacred associations evoked by Qur’anic form strategically

Arabic “Do not urinate!” sign in Dhaka (Image credit: Global voices)

While the hapless woman in Lahore likely was unaware of the sacred associations evoked by the print on her dress, authorities in Bangladesh use the form of Qur’anic Arabic more strategically.

In Dhaka, as elsewhere on the subcontinent, it is common practice for men to urinate on the street, due to inadequate public toilets.

In addition to providing better sanitary facilities, the Ministry of Religious Affairs commissioned prohibitive messages against public urination in Arabic.

Why write prohibitive messages against public urination in Arabic instead of Bangla, even though Arabic is a language Bangladeshis recognize mostly in relation to the Qur’an?

For many Bangladeshis, as for Pakistanis, anything written in Arabic in a font associated with the Qur’an seems sacred. While they are unlikely to understand the meaning of the prohibitive messages written in Arabic, the use of the form of Qur’anic Arabic for the prohibition is effective, as people will be fearful to urinate on what they assume to be a sacred Qur’anic verse.

In both cases, it is the form that evokes the association with the sacred text, not the content.

These two episodes demonstrate that in the meaning-making process, there is often a complex negotiation and interaction between form and content of language. Conventionally, we give more precedence to content at the peril of losing the meaning conveyed to us by form. The overlooking of form can lead to misunderstandings, as happened in Lahore, just as the deliberate use of form can become a powerful tool to evoke associations that bypass content and thus shape perceptions. Alongside content, the form of language, script, or font shape and are shaped by the meanings they are supposed to carry. A neglect of form in our everyday perception of language can only lead to a fractured understanding of how meaning is produced and how it is perceived and consumed.

***

Yasser Shams Khan is an Assistant Professor of Literature, Department of English Literature and Linguistics, Qatar University. He is the recipient of the 2024 British Association for Romantic Studies President’s Fellowship. His work focuses on the history of theatricality and performance practices, with specific interest in issues of race, Orientalism, and empire in the long eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

***

Related content

Ahmad, Rizwan. 2022. Mal Lawwal: Linguistic landscapes of Qatar
Ahmad, Rizwan. 2020. “I regret having named him Sahil”: Urdu names in India
Grey, Alexandra. 2018. Do you ever wear language?
Piller, Ingrid. 2010. Transliterated brand names
Piller, Ingrid. 2013. Linguistic theory in Dubai

Ramadan Lights on Coventry Street

Ramadan in London is exceptional in many ways. As the centre of a former Empire which still exerts a global pull on its former subjects and their descendants, London has been at the heart of a wave of migrations since the times of the British Raj. Initiatives inclusive of Muslims have normalised the Muslim presence. While there is no doubt that islamophobia and anti-Muslim hate is on the rise in Britain, too, the relative ease and acceptance of being a Muslim in the public space is manifested here in pragmatic ways, such as the widespread availability of halal food.

London’s Ramadan celebrations are in a class of its own. London’s Ramadan illuminations of 2023 were a testament to the diversity, inclusivity and vibrancy of London. When London’s first ever Ramadan lights were switched on by the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, and the Lord Mayor of Westminster, Hamza Taouzzale, Muslims felt acknowledged in the public space generating a sense of understanding and promoting an equitable society.

Open iftars are another example. These have taken place for decades in Britain, and Muslims and non-Muslims break the fast together in public spaces. Sharing meals with strangers is a powerful experience for people of all faiths. Open iftars are incredibly important to get visibility and also to have communitywide engagement with each other, as is the essence of Islam. Some of the picturesque and breathtakingly beautiful environments where open iftars have taken place include Victoria and Albert Museum, Trafalgar Square, and Cambridge University.

Ramadan 2023 marked a particularly significant moment in British history as Muslim leaders were for the first time invited to the official residence of the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street for an iftar meal.

Corporate Europe is starting to celebrate Ramadan, too. Furniture retailer IKEA, for instance,  launched the GOKVÄLLÅ collection this year with clear connections to the Ramadan spirit.

My Ramadan

The visibility of Ramadan in public shapes personal experiences of Ramadan, too. For me, we start preparing for Ramadan months ahead by getting the house ready, shopping, and cooking. What I aim to do is complete mundane task before the start of the Holy Month, so that there is more time for spiritual reflection and Quran reading.

Ramadan lights in the streets and open iftars remind me of the beauty of our human diversity through these newly formed traditions in Europe.

As the Quran states, “Among His signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the difference of your languages and colours. There are indeed signs in that for those who know” (30:22).

I wish all who celebrate and observe the month of Ramadan a time full of divine blessings! Ameen.

Map of Transoxania (Source: Wikipedia)

Editor’s note: Arabic language learning is experiencing a revival in many parts of the world, such as China, where it may be a source of empowerment for impoverished Muslim women. This post by Mehrinigor Akhmedova (Bukhara State University, Uzbekistan) and Rizwan Ahmad (Qatar University, Qatar) takes us to Uzbekistan, a part of the post-Soviet world, where some aspects of Transoxania’s multilingual past are being revived for religious and economic reasons.

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Mehrinigor Akhmedova, Bukhara State University, Uzbekistan
Rizwan Ahmad, Qatar University, Qatar
***

Recently, interest in the learning of Arabic language and script among the young generation of Uzbeks has been rising. Young Uzbeks are learning Arabic not simply because of their faith, Islam, but also because it is desirable in the domestic job market and opens a window of opportunities in the Arabic-speaking Gulf states.

In September 2023, the Department of Islamic History Source Studies, Philosophy at Bukhara State University invited a professor from Egypt’s Al-Azhar University to teach courses in Arabic. This is a significant change in the history of Arabic and Islamic learning in Uzbekistan. During the Soviet rule and early years of independence in 1991, Uzbekistan witnessed many ups and down regarding the place of Islam in the constitutionally secular Uzbek society. In 1998, fearing radical Islamic ideologies, the government closed many madrasas, traditional schools of learning, established soon after the independence.

Liquidation of Madrasas and Teaching of Arabic in Uzbekistan

Although the repression of Islam in the former Soviet republics, including modern-day Uzbekistan, began during the Tsarist regime, it reached its climax during the Soviet rule following the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. The state repression of Islam took many forms, including the persecution and killing of mudarris and ulama, teachers and scholars of Islam, nationalization of vaqf properties, Islam endowments, and forceful removal of veils from Muslim women, known as the hujum campaign.

Dome of the Mir-i-Arab Madrasa (Image credit: Wikipedia)

On the educational and sociolinguistic fronts, the repression led to the dismantling of the centuries old traditional Islamic educational system of maktabs and madrasas where students learned to read and recite the Qur’an in Arabic. In 1928, the Fourth Meeting of the Central Executive Committee of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic issued an order on the liquidation of all old method schools and madrasas. According to Ashirbek Muminov and Rinat Shigabdinov, before the 1928 decree, there were 1,362 madrasas in Uzbekistan with 21,183 students enrolled in them.

Another measure that damaged Arabic teaching and learning was the decision to replace the traditional Arabic script of Uzbek with a Latin-based writing system in 1927. Ten years later in 1937, as a measure of Russification, the Cyrillic script replaced the Latin script. These measures dealt a death blow to the teaching of Islam and Arabic language and script in Uzbekistan. In 1945, as a token of acceptance of religious institutions, Stalin allowed Mir-e-Arab madrasa, established in the 16th century, in Bukhara, to reopen with a limited number of students. Subsequently, two more institutions of Islamic learning were established; namely, madrasa Baraq Khan in 1956 and Tashkent Islamic Institute of Imam al-Bukhari in 1971.

Arabic within Multilingual Transoxiana

Present-day Uzbekistan, which in pre-modern times, was part of the larger Transoxiana region in Central Asia, was a thriving center of Arabic language and literature. The Persian-speaking Samanids (819-999 AD), who ruled Central Asia from their capital in Bukhara under the suzerainty of the Arabic-speaking Abbasids, maintained Arabic as the language of administration, Islamic learning, and sciences. The Samanids simultaneously encouraged use of Persian in the court. Under their patronage, many Arabic texts were translated into Persian, including the Quranic tafsir, exegesis, of Al-Tabari (d. 923 AD) and the Kalila wa Dimnah, a collection of fables, originally written in Sanskrit.

1958 Soviet stamp celebrating the 1100th birthday of Rudaki (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Rudaki (858-940), born and raised in Bukhara and regarded as the founder of New Persian Poetry, was granted the esteemed position of the court poet of the Samanids.

In this multilingual linguistic and intellectual environment, there emerged in Bukhara two towering figures among the scholars of Hadith, the most foundational Islamic text after the Quran, namely Muhammad ibn Isma’il al-Bukhari aka Imam Bukhari (810-870 AD) and Muhammad ibn Isa known as Al-Tirmidhi (824-892). Both were born in the Bukhara region of what is today Uzbekistan. In pursuit of the compilation of the Hadith, the sayings of Prophet Muhammad, they travelled widely to different parts of the Muslim world. They wrote their collections of hadith in Arabic, known as Sahih Al-Bukhari and Sunan Al-Tirmidhi respectively.

To the illustrious history of Bukhara as a center of Arabic can be added the polymath and physician Ibn Sina (980-1037), known as Avicenna in Latin Western sources. He is considered to be the father of early modern medicine. Born in Afshona in Bukhara, Ibn Sina, had memorized the whole of the Quran before the age of ten. Later he turned his attention to the study of medicine. He authored many books in Arabic on philosophy, mathematics and other branches of knowledge. In medicine, his famous work is Al-Qanoon fi Al-Tib, “The Canon of Medicine.” This work consists of five volumes with over 1 million words. He was the physician of the Samanid ruler Nuh II (976-997).

In September 2023, in a speech delivered in the UN, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, the president of Uzbekistan, named Imam Bukhari and Ibn Sina, among others, as scholars who richly contributed to science and showed that Islam was a religion of knowledge and peace.

Rise of Interest in Arabic in contemporary Bukhara

After the repression of Arabic and Islamic teaching during Soviet rule, there are signs of change in today’s Uzbekistan. In addition to official institutions such as Bukhara University encouraging the teaching of Arabic, many private language centers have also recently emerged in the city of Bukhara. There are over 50 private language centers in Bukhara, including popular ones like Takallum, An-Nisa, and Naqshbandi School.

Drawing of viscera from Ibn Sina’s “Canon of Medicine” (Source: Wellcome Collection)

On their Facebook page, Takallum invites students as follows, “…reciting the Qur’an with Tajweed is our obligatory deed and our deed will lead us to Paradise! Lead your friends to paradise, help them read the Quran, be a true friend for them”. Evidently, for Takallum the learning of Arabic is coupled with Islamic beliefs and practices.

Based on a pilot study conducted in September-October 2023, we found that there are clear signs of the rise in the interest in Arabic learning. First, we discuss a survey that was given online to an active Telegram group called NIسA_School, Ayollar Maktabi, with over 14,000 women members. The use of the Arabic letter س in the first word of the group is indexical of the fact that it brings back the Arabic language and its history in Uzbekistan.

Next, we discuss statistics of students who received Arabic language proficiency certificates from Davlat Test Markazi Buxoro Viloyat Bo’limi, National Test Center, Bukhara Region.

In response to the survey question ‘what was your goal of learning Arabic?’, an overwhelming 82% of the participants (N=347) answered that they considered learning Arabic as most important knowledge for their self-development. Related to this personal/spiritual goal of learning Arabic was the response from 14% of the participants who learned Arabic in order to teach it to others.

It is important to mention here that Muslims believe that God rewards those who read the Qur’an in the original Arabic, even if they do not understand its message. This means that the original Arabic text has spiritual value that cannot be gained by reading it in translation.

The remaining 4% learned Arabic because they wanted to live and work in an Arabic-speaking country.

Another indicator of the rising interest in Arabic comes from the data of students who have received a proficiency certificate in Arabic based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). In 2022, Uzbekistan started to use the six-point CEFR proficiency levels from A1-A2, basic user, through B1-B2, independent user, to C1-C2, proficient user. Since the implementation of CEFR in 2022, the total number of students receiving CEFR enrolled in different Arabic language teaching centers in the Bukhara region alone was 3,079. The vast majority of them (92%) received B1 and B2 and the remaining 8% received the higher proficiency level C1. No Uzbek students attained C2, the highest-level proficiency.

Post-Soviet transformations

Bukhara, Old City (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Another important factor propelling people’s interest in Arabic learning is that the Government of Uzbekistan encourages learning of foreign languages and rewards those who earn high-level proficiency certificates in them. According to a presidential decree of 2021, teachers of Arabic and other foreign languages with a C1 certificate will be paid an additional bonus of 50% of their basic salary. Similarly, employees in any government agency possessing any national or international certificate in a foreign language will receive an extra bonus of 20% on their basic salary. Furthermore, students applying for admission into master’s and Ph.D. in the philological studies must show a C1 level proficiency in a foreign language and those in non-philological fields must have a B2 level proficiency.

The discussion above clearly suggests that the changes following the collapse of the Soviet Union have transformed the linguistic and educational fields. Uzbekistan, one of the great centers of Arabic language during the medieval era is witnessing a renaissance in the learning of Arabic after a long period of state suppression. Many young Uzbeks are rediscovering their history by learning the Arabic language and its script. The government’s incentives of learning a foreign language make Arabic learning even more attractive.

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Akhmedova Mehrinigor Bahodirovna is Associate Professor of Linguistics in the Department of English Literature & Translation Studies at Bukhara State University. Her research covers issues related to translation, literature, spirituality and sociolinguistics.

Image 1

Like many parents of teenagers, I delightedly welcome any occasion to connect with a generation I don’t always understand and that doesn’t always understand me. As a Muslim family in Australia, this inter-generational exchange is often characterized by questions from my children about our Islamic practices and how we talk about these with our friends who are not Muslim. One of the most questioned of these practices is Ramadan, the month in the Islamic calendar when Muslims abstain from consumption of food and drink during the day.

So, when my children began texting me a range of Ramadan-themed memes, I was elated to find something that we could relate to and laugh at together. Image 1 has always topped the list of our favorites.

There are many versions of this meme, and it owes its popularity to the fact that across generations, we answer this question every Ramadan, without fail. In fact, the first time I showed this meme to a work friend, he exclaimed, “Hey, I asked you that, too!” We both laughed (at him) and then, spent the next half hour going through other Ramadan memes, like those in Image 2 and Image 3.

Image 3

Image 2

And once more, I shared not just a laugh with someone, but an opening for genuine intercultural communication and sharing. In the numerous conversations these memes inspired, most expressed that they had no idea that there was a ‘world’ of Muslim memes that entertained and explained.

For me, these memes have played two important communication roles: intergenerational and intercultural. In the Australian context, second and third generation Muslims communicate with each other and outside of the Muslim community in English. Many of their linguistic expressions relate to sarcasm, irony and wordplays based on English. Their cultural references are TV shows like Friends and The Hunger Games and there is no shortage of memes based on dialogues from popular TV shows and movies. The creative efforts behind Muslim-based memes have been written about in numerous places such as here.

The humor not only provides a platform for internal communication for Muslims but also a means to connect to non-Muslims, with whom they share these linguistic expressions and cultural references. Both my Muslim and non-Muslim friends always get a kick out of the memes in Image 4 and Image 5. By the way, iftar is the meal eaten at sunset to break the day’s fast and traditionally begins with the consumption of dates.

Image 4

Image 5

Humor – specifically, humor in a language and mode that we all relate to – connects us and provides access to the practices of a community often questioned and misunderstood. A few years back, the ABC offered a Ramadan explainer using a series of memes and tweets. There are also innumerable social media feeds devoted to Muslim memes, such as this Facebook page or this Twitter feed.

The volume of meme production on these platforms is indicative of the time devoted to this means of communication. In a study of young American Muslim women who engage in meme-making, Ali (2020) showed how these memes allow their creators to negotiate aspects of their citizenship in USA. For a community that is often subject to stereotyping, these memes offer a way to construct their own identity.

I think that is true, also, of me and my teenagers. We can rummage through our sociolinguistic repertoire, draw on the pertinent elements of our identities, and exercise some control over the way we present ourselves as Muslims. Many of these memes have been the starting point of deeper and more engaging conversations about being Muslim in Australia today.

Image 6

As we come to the end of Ramadan this week and look forward to the day of Eid to celebrate a month of fasting, I have been sharing the meme in Image 6 far and wide.

References

Ali, I. (2020). Muslim women meme-ing citizenship in the era of War on Terror militarism. The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 106(3), 334–340.

Related content

Piller, I. (2009). Ramadan Kareem! Or: Urban Etiquette for Monolinguals. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/urban-etiquette-for-monolinguals/
Piller, I. (2017). Money makes the world go round. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/money-makes-the-world-go-round/
Tenedero, P. P. P. (2023). Lent, Language, and Faith Work. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/lent-language-and-faith-work/
Wehbe, A. (2017). Silent Invisible Women. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/silent-invisible-women/

Akhlaq Ahmad at work on the mural in Shahdara for the ‘Delhi, I Love You’ project. (Image Credit: Delhi, I Love You)

On July 8, 2020, The Wire published an anonymous article by a young Indian Muslim. In it, the writer shares his painful experience of how, in the anti-Muslim Hindutva climate created by the right-wing BJP government, his identity has been reduced to his Muslim name. Despite the fact that he observes no Islamic practices and champions liberal views, his Hindu colleagues look at him with suspicion. On social media, he is often called a jihadi, an ISIS-sympathizer, and mulla, a slur, for speaking up for the rights of minorities, especially Muslims.

Fearing for his life, he has stopped saying in public salamwaleikum, the Muslim greeting in Urdu. He also instructed his kids not to call him abba, an Urdu word for ‘dad’. He even started tweaking his name, so that it does not sound Muslim.

While violence, including mob-lynching of Muslims and the anti-Muslim pogrom in Delhi in February 2020, has been discussed, the symbolic violence against the Urdu language—a proxy for and target of hate and discrimination against Muslims—hasn’t. I use the term Urdu in a broader sense to encompass the language as well as names.

Consider Urdu personal names and cases of hatred and discrimination that revolve around the identities they reveal. It is worth noting that the  BJP government in the last few years has renamed many places containing Urdu/Muslim names with names that evoke Hindu history and culture.

Personal names are not simply a system of identification by which people differentiate one person from another; they are also carriers of cultural information, including the social identities of the bearers of the names. A study conducted in the USA found that white-sounding names such as Emily and Greg were more likely to get callbacks from employers than Black-sounding names Lakisha and Jamal. While some names in the US clearly indicate racial identity, others such as John and Michelle are non-discernable. By contrast, in India, most Muslim names are discernable as they draw largely upon Persian and Arabic sources as against Hindu names which are derived, among other sources, from Hindu traditions. Since Urdu names are signposts of the Muslim identity, they easily become instruments of hate and discrimination against Muslims.

In May 2015, a Muslim young man, Zeeshan, holding an MBA degree was denied a job by Hare Krishna Exports, a diamond company based in Mumbai, because of his religion. Less than fifteen minutes after he submitted his application online, Zeeshan received a shocking reply from the company: “We regret to inform you that we hire only non-Muslim candidates”. Clearly, the decision to reject his application was based on the candidate’s Urdu/Muslim name.

Other cases of discrimination based on Muslim names have surfaced recently in companies that deliver goods to people on their doors. On 24 April, 2020, during the COVID-19 lockdown, Barkat Patel, a Muslim employee of Grofers, an online grocery store, went to deliver grocery to Ms. Chaturvedi at Jaya Park in Mumbai. But her father stopped her from taking the delivery. According to the report filed at the police station,  the father wanted to know the  name of the delivery guy first. Once he found out from the name that Barkat was Muslim, he refused to take it. Barkat recorded the whole exchange on his mobile phone and submitted it to the police.

Similar cases of discrimination were reported from Zomato and Swiggy, popular food delivery companies. On October 25, 2019, Swiggy lodged a complaint with a police station in Hyderabad stating that a customer refused to receive their food order because the delivery man was Muslim. Another case of discrimination was reported on August 1, 2019 in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh. In this case, a customer Amit Shukla cancelled his Zomato delivery when he found out from the name Faiyaz that his delivery man was Muslim. What makes it even more reprehensible is that Shukla argued that this was part of his freedom of expression and religion guaranteed by the constitution.

However, names don’t always correspond with social-religious identities. Some Hindu names of Persian or Arabic origin bear similarities with Urdu/Muslim name. In absence of other visual cues e.g. outfit or facial looks, such names could miscommunicate the identities of the bearers of the names. This is exactly what happened when a 23-old young Hindu man named Sahil was lynched by some Hindus in Maujpur in Delhi. Although the police denies the claim, Sahil’s parents, Sunil and Suneeta, both believe that their son was killed because he was mistaken for a Muslim who had entered a Hindu neighborhood. Suneeta expressed her regret at naming him Sahil, “I wouldn’t have named him Sahil had I known that it would turn out to be the cause of his death”. The incident that led to Sahil’s killing is worth mentioning. Sahil was at home when he found out that some of his friends had a brawl in Gali Number 5 in Maujpur, Delhi. When he rushed to the spot to resolve the issue the residents of the neighborhood asked his name. On knowing that his name was Sahil, the crowd turned to him and thrashed him severely. He died on his way to the hospital.

In another case, a Muslim man’s nickname, which did not sound Muslim, actually saved him. On May 19, 2016, as part of beautification of Delhi, Akhlaq Ahmad, an Indian artist who holds a degree in fine arts, and Swen Simon, a French artist, were writing an Urdu couplet on a wall in Shahdara, Delhi. Some members of the right-wing RSS gathered there and asked them to stop writing the couplet in Urdu and threatened them with dire consequences if they didn’t. They said, “ …they could bear anything, but not the Urdu script” They snatched the artists’ paintbrushes and smudged the Urdu writing on the wall. In an interview, the Muslim artist, said, “…I said my name is Shabbu [his nick name] and they assumed I was Shambhu, a Hindu. So, they turned their ire towards my French colleague, Swen Simon, asking him to pay me my wages and go back to Lahore”.

This exception only proves the rule. The cases of Sahil and Akhlaq/Sabbu are both of some kind of miscommunication based on Muslim names. The action that led to the loss of Sahil’s life and saved Akhlaq’s is based on the ideology of hate and discrimination against Muslims as manifested from their names.

The fear of uttering Urdu names, greetings, or words in public is increasing among Muslims in north India. In response to the anonymous article with which I opened this piece, Rana Safvi, a Muslim writer tweeted that she also avoids saying salaam, Muslim greeting, in public.

Although Akhlaq had a sigh of relief because his non-Muslim-sounding name saved him, the stories of Zeeshan, Barkat, Sahil, and Faiyaz, clearly show how ideologies of hate and discrimination can be routed through personal names, labels over which we as bearers of the names have little control.

Discrimination based on names are just be a tip of the iceberg of a larger systemic process of exclusion and marginalization of Muslims in India. A democracy worthy of its name cannot allow names to be the ground of discrimination against its own citizens in whose very name it rules.

Related content

• Stereotyped names as a barrier to workplace entry
• What’s in a name?
• Behind a name
• Names on the move: Ghanaian names in the diaspora

Muslim women praying in a Minquan mosque

While everyone knows that China is now the second largest economy in the world, few people realize that there are still over five million people living in poverty in the country. The majority of China’s poor live in its multilingual and multicultural peripheral regions.

Therefore, as part of its efforts to eradicate poverty, the Chinese government has implemented the nationwide project to promote Putonghua as a form of linguistic capital. This promotion of Putonghua – along with widespread English language learning – from above has been widely discussed and researched by Chinese sociolinguists (see, for instance, these PhD theses available right here on Language on the Move: Grey, 2017, Li, 2017, Yang, 2013, Zhang, 2011).

However, what seems to have been largely overlooked is language learning of other languages from below and the empowerment it can bring, as I learned in my research into Arabic language learning in Minquan, a Muslim-centered and poverty-stricken region.

Socioeconomic and demographic features of Minquan

Located in the far east of Henan Province, central China, Minquan County has a population of 870,000. The vast majority of these are farmers. Because the ever more frequent droughts have rendered production of the main crops of maize, cotton, peanuts, and wheat unstable, an increasing number of young people are leaving Minquan for China’s big developed cities in search of better opportunities.

Education and literacy levels in Minquan are low in comparison with the rest of China and only two third of teenagers in Minquan continue their studies beyond compulsory junior high school education.

Another feature of Minquan is its sizable Hui ethnic minority, whose members are Muslim. In Minquan it is common for local people to exchange greetings in Arabic and for the women to wear colorful hijabs. Five times a day, the streets echo with the Muslim call to prayer chanted slowly and sonorously in Arabic over the audio systems of the local mosques.

Arabic as a way out for Minquan’s Muslim women

The Hui ethnic group do not have their own language but speak Chinese. However, in recent years, I have observed an increasing trend for local people to study Arabic, the holy language of Islam, not only for religious purposes but also for material profit. For my graduation research project at Yunnan University, I probed the Arabic language learning experiences of three Muslim women from Minquan. All three participants, two of whom are my relatives, were born and raised in Muslim families in Minquan. Their mother tongue is Chinese and they all started to study Arabic formally in their teens.

Their reasons for Arabic language study were initially due to their limited opportunities.

The youngest participant, Ma Lifang (all names are pseudonyms) is a 19-year-old high-school graduate, who has studied Arabic in a mosque since 2018. After failing the gaokao (the national university entrance exam), she followed an imam’s recommendation to learn Arabic in order to maintain her education and with an eye to a profitable future through Arabic as experienced by Ma Zhenyi (32) and Ma Xiangling (39).

Ma Zhenyi is an entrepreneur who now runs her own translation and interpreting company in Yiwu, the world largest wholesale market. Despite her excellent academic performance in junior high school and her desire to continue her studies, she was denied the opportunity of receiving a high school education because of her family’s poverty. The traditionally low expectations on Muslim women in her community also played a role. While she did not have the courage at age 15 to oppose her parents when it came to high school, she found a way to convince them to let her study Arabic in the mosque:

别人都一直说，都是建议让我跟爸爸妈妈讲（我想学），然后当时也没那么大的勇气。因为我姐姐她也想去学习，但是爸妈没同意，就没学成。我也没有那么大的勇气去说。后来越学越感兴趣，越学越感兴趣。然后，就鼓起勇气说。
Others kept telling me, suggesting that I should tell my parents (I want to study), but I didn’t have the courage. My older sister also meant to study, but my dad and mom refused and she could not. I just didn’t have the courage. Later Arabic interested me more and more, I had to be brave enough to tell them. (Interview with Ma Zhenyi)

Perhaps it was Ma Zhenyi’s talent in memorizing Arabic verses that contributed to her success; or the fact that her older sister could share the family’s financial burden so that Ma Zhenyi could have the chance of further study for a couple of years. Either way, while seeking her spiritual asylum in the holy language of Islam, Ma Zhenyi could continue to study and build her dream for the future.

Middle-Eastern buyer checking cargo with seller in Yiwu (Image credit: promotional video for Yiwu)

Her excellent performance together with her deep faith next launched her to another opportunity to continue her Islamic and Arabic studies in Xi’an, one of China’s largest cities and the capital of Shaanxi Province. At that stage, she won a scholarship to go to Egypt for further Arabic study. There, she met her husband and when both of them returned to China, they settled in Yiwu, where they first took up Arabic translation and interpreting jobs and eventually opened their own translation company in 2012.

Ma Xiangling (39) also works as an Arabic-Chinese translator and interpreter in Yiwu. Like Ma Zhenyi, she was denied a senior high school education after graduating from junior high school in 1998. She was sent to learn Arabic at a local mosque-based school instead. At the time, she did not expect any material rewards from learning Arabic at all. She simply followed the local expectation of being a good Muslim woman in the hope that she might assist her future husband and educate their child in the faith. Upon graduation, she got married but almost immediately found herself engulfed in constant domestic violence. Over many years, Ma Xiangling’s life was torn to pieces as her only financial support was her tormenting husband. She finally managed to regain her freedom through a painful divorce. In 2014, with the help of friends doing business in Yiwu, she revived her Arabic language skills and migrated to Yiwu to work as translator there.

Self-transformation through Arabic

Confronting their disadvantages in age, gender and poverty, these three women turned to Arabic as a way out.

All three women started to learn Arabic as a low-cost study option when they failed to progress in the Chinese public educational system. Their parents believed that learning Arabic would increase their daughters’ marriage prospects by making them good assistants to their future husbands serving the faith. The value of speaking Arabic as a profitable commodity in the new contexts of China’s global expansion was not obvious to my participants until they embarked on their journey and seriously invested in learning Arabic. Nevertheless, their Arabic skills have shaped a brand new life vision for them.

Ma Xiangling’s social media post in Chinese and Arabic about destiny (my English translation)

Their years of investment into Arabic have transformed their identities from poor subjugated Muslim women into independent and enterprising individuals. Despite failing to gain admission to a Chinese university, Ma Lifang, for instance, now even considers PhD study within her reach:

有的(课本）都是北大的什么的… 还有那种全阿语的.都是老师们从国外给带来的。好多老师也是从国外的毕业，还有博士学位。
Some (textbooks) are from Peking University, and some are written in Arabic, imported from abroad. Many teachers graduated from abroad, some with PhD degree. (Interview with Ma Lifang)

When asked what she wanted to do with her life, Ma Lifang readily talked about several options, such as taking up a translation job in China’s booming export industry or going abroad for higher education, just like her teachers.

Ma Zhenyi has experienced the transformational career that Ma Lifang anticipates. Learning Arabic has expanded her life trajectory from a poor village girl first to the big city of Xi’an and from there to Egypt. The level of Arabic language proficiency she gained there, enabled her to work as an interpreter and translator in Yiwu, and later to establish her own business there.

Business opportunities related to Arabic are plentiful, as she explained to me:

大概有目前来说有102个国家的人来这里(义乌)进行购物。其中呢大概有40到50个国家，大概了50%左右是以阿拉伯语为沟通媒介的……我现在接触的这些人啊，多数都是在40以上的。年龄40以上的人并没有意识到他们需要学英语你知道吗。
There are foreign businessmen from 102 countries coming to Yiwu to purchase commodities. 40 or 50 countries out of 102, about 50% of foreigners use Arabic for communication…the majority of my foreign customers are over 40 years old. You know, people over 40 are not aware of the necessity to speak English. (Interview with Ma Zhenyi)

Although Ma Xiangling’s career has been less stellar, Arabic has transformed her, too, into an economically and spiritually independent woman supporting herself and her family. In January 2020, her family (her parents and her disabled son) was able to move into a newly built two-storey house.

Tensions and contradictions of Arabic

Despite their empowerment, Arabic is not a panacea and all three women face tensions and contradictions embedded in wider structural constraints that are beyond their control.

Reflecting on the profits Arabic has brought to her, Ma Zhenyi, for instance strongly feels the tension between its material and spiritual rewards. While she is grateful for the material rewards that learning Arabic has brought her, she also finds herself in a constant state of dilemma between her entrepreneurial identity as a successful businesswoman and her sense of guilt at not having enough time for prayer and reading Quran, or for mothering her school-aged daughter.

The gendered market also impacts their opportunities to invest in their future, as Arabic language practices are more gendered than those of many other languages. Ma Xiangling explained that women can only go so far with Arabic. While they might be able to secure a translation job in Yiwu or elsewhere in China, their opportunities to work abroad or even travel for business are heavily constrained, particularly when it comes to major Arabic-speaking trading partners like Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

Ma Xiangling’s reflections on working abroad must be understood against the emerging oversupply of Arabic speakers in China as Chinese universities have begun to actively promote non-English foreign languages. As a middle-aged woman without a degree, Arabic proficiency alone is no longer enough to make her feel confident about her future.

Arabic as a third space

Arabic has become a significant foreign language for China’s relationship with the Middle East. However, for the women in my study, it is much more than that. Arabic also functions as a way out, as a reachable escape route for Muslim women who have been trapped in the cage of poverty and religion.

Reciting Arabic verses as a child, reading the Holy Quran as a teenager, and eventually translating for Sino-Middle East trade as adults, Chinese Muslim women from less-developed areas have turned the Arabic language into a third space where they can continue their education, obtain career success, and achieve emancipation in their daily lives. In Minquan, this impoverished corner of the world, Arabic provides both a spiritual asylum and financial independence. It frees and awakens Muslim women tormented by misogyny and poverty.

After quoting to me the Hadith “all men are brothers”, Ma Zhenyi added what has been missing from there: “and women are sisters.”

References

Grey, A. (2017). How do language rights affect minority languages in China? An ethnographic investigation of the Zhuang minority language under conditions of rapid social change. (PhD), Macquarie University.
Li, J. (2017). Social Reproduction and Migrant Education: A Critical Sociolinguistic Ethnography of Burmese Students’ Learning Experiences at a Border High School in China. (PhD), Macquarie University.
Yang, H. (2012). Naxi, Chinese and English: Multilingualism in Lijiang. (PhD), Macquarie University.
Zhang, J. (2011). Language Policy and Planning for the 2008 Beijing Olympics: An Investigation of the Discursive Construction of an Olympic City and a Global Population. (PhD), Macquarie University.

But what if you are also Deaf or Hard of Hearing? You don’t fit in the ‘Hearing’ world or the ‘Deaf’ world. You can’t quite fit into your own family or community, either, because of your hearing loss and in the wider world you face multiple communication and language barriers. Where do you fit then? How do you manage your multiple identities?

This is what I sought to find out.

My name is Ayah and I am an Australian Lebanese-Muslim woman with a hearing impairment. I was born and raised in Australia, and growing up I have faced many challenges due to both my ethnicity and my hearing loss. My hearing loss added another barrier I have had to face, not only in the wider Australian community but in the Lebanese-Muslim community as well. There is a lack of support, understanding and awareness about hearing loss, and other disabilities, in the Lebanese-Muslim community, and a lack of understanding and acceptance of Islam, and other ethnic minority backgrounds, in Australia, including in the Deaf community.

I want to close that gap.

The intersection of fitting into these different categories related to gender, culture, religion and disability meant I have faced a unique, complex and silent experience of trying to find out who I am and where I fit. My journey of self-discovery and passion to understand the world around me led me to pursue a degree and career as a Social Researcher.

Last year, as a requirement of my Social Research and Policy Degree at the University of New South Wales, I devoted my honours research to this topic. My thesis explored the identities and lived experiences of Australian Lebanese-Muslim women with hearing impairment and investigated if they perceive their hearing loss as a ‘blessing’ or a ‘curse’. This thesis also aimed to raise awareness and break the strong cultural stigma associated with hearing loss in the Lebanese-Muslim community, as well as contribute to the wider discourse about diversity in the Deaf community.

As a researcher with these multiple identities myself, I used auto-ethnography to incorporate my own reflections and insights into the study. Auto-ethnography is a theoretical and methodological approach where ‘researchers use themselves as their own primary research subject’ (Butz & Besio 2009, p. 1665). Within this framework, I also used data from my Facebook page Silent Signs, where I share my experiences and observations in different community settings.

Additionally, I conducted semi-structured interviews with eight women living in Sydney, who also identified as Australian, Lebanese and Muslim women with a hearing impairment. Recruitment, preparing and conducting the interviews were a fundamental part of my research. Numerous challenges emerged due to language and communication barriers; reflecting the lived experiences of these women. For example, consent forms were offered in English and Arabic, a sign language interpreter was hired for three of the interviews and, due to my own hearing loss, assistance was needed with transcribing the interviews. I even made a video in Auslan (Australian sign language) to recruit participants and this proved to be a successful way of approaching and connecting with these women. You can view the video here.

Numerous themes and results emerged from my research and the key findings can be summarized as follows:

• Most of the women regard Auslan as their primary language.
• The majority of participants identified themselves by their hearing-loss identity first, followed by their identity as a ‘Muslim’ which was in the top two responses. Most of the women who chose the ‘Muslim’ identity stressed that religion allowed them to cope with all the different challenges they faced and to even perceive their hearing loss as a blessing from God. Many gave thanks and the Arabic phrase ‘Alhamdulillah’ (which translates as ‘All praise belongs to God’) was used numerous times by different women.
• All women in the study faced different identity challenges such as conflicts between their ‘Muslim’, ‘Deaf’ and other identities. Navigating their ‘Lebanese’, ‘Australian’ and ‘Woman’ identities also included other identities such as being a ‘Mother’, ‘Wife’ or ‘Student’.
• The women’s experiences and stories also showed that strong cultural stigma, barriers to communication, isolation in the family and a lack of accessibility in the community served to produce hearing loss as a ‘curse’.

Of course, my thesis has obvious limitations, including a very narrow sample. More expansive research will be needed not only to highlight diversity in deaf discourse but to also close the anecdotal gap between Islam and disability. I look forward to expanding on my honours thesis and conducting further research to meet these research desiderata.

At the moment, I am working at Advance Diversity Services on a research project about the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and accessibility for people from different ethnic backgrounds. I also volunteer with MuslimCare Australia where I run a “Muslim Deaf Group” to raise awareness and provide support for other people like myself.

I recently collaborated with the Muslim Deaf Association Sydney on a Ramadan project where we encouraged people to sign “Ramadan Mubarak” in Auslan and send in their videos. You can see the final video here.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions at Silent Signs.

Ramadan Mubarak!

Language Lovers Blogging Competition 2017

If you liked this post, don’t forget to vote for Language on the Move in the 2017 Language Lovers blogging competition over at the ba.bla voting page! Voting closes on June 06.

References

Butz, D., & Besio, K. (2009). Autoethnography Geography Compass, 3 (5), 1660-1674 DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2009.00279.x

Wehbe, A., (2016), ‘Blessing or a Curse? Exploring the Identity and Lived Experiences of Australian, Lebanese, Muslim Women with a Hearing Impairment’, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

Churchill Square Shopping Mall, Brighton, UK (Source: Wikipedia)

In a shopping mall in the city of Brighton, UK, a tourist was arrested on terrorism charges last week for taking a selfie video. Surely, taking selfies in a shopping mall is such a part of contemporary culture that the act itself wouldn’t raise an eyebrow? What was different in the case of this tourist and this selfie? Well, the protagonist of the selfie did not speak English. According to a Daily Mail article, this is how the selfie-taking tourist aroused suspicion:

A Sussex Police spokesman said they were called by security staff after they ‘had challenged a 38-year-old London man who was filming on his mobile phone and recording in a foreign language’. The spokesman added: ‘They were concerned about his motives and he was reported to be acting strangely.’

What “foreign language” do you guess the tourist was speaking? Are you picturing tourists from France or Germany, where the holiday season has just started? Or tourists from China or Japan, who are globally stereotyped as excessive image takers? It’s unlikely that you do, and it’s unlikely that a tourist recording a selfie in any of these languages would have attracted the suspicions of a Brighton security guard.

The suspicious language – you guessed it – was Arabic. The tourist, Nasser Al-Ansari, a 38-year-old London resident and Kuwait native, was recording a Snapchat message for his friends back home. The man was released after three hours, and his side of the story is described in the Daily Mail as follows:

The former banker, who has lived in London since 2013, said: ‘It was a very horrible experience and unacceptable to happen without any specific reason or suspicion.’ ‘It is absurd. It is not something I would expect when visiting somewhere in the UK.’ He added: ‘I was very understanding and I said to them “I know it was a foreign language and my race is a factor but please be fair”. ‘I think there is a thin line between being safe and going over-the-top and this time I think they went a little over-the-top.’

According to the police, it was the “foreign language” spoken by Mr Al-Ansari that was suspicious; he himself links language and race in trying to explain why he was targeted; and some social media commentators, also raised his religion as a factor. One blogger, for instance, went with the headline “Muslim tourist takes selfie in Brighton, arrested on terrorism offences.”

We have often discussed the relationship between linguistic and racial discrimination here on Language on the Move (e.g., ‘Race to teach English;’ ‘Linguistic discrimination at work;’ ‘Shopping while bilingual can make you sick;’ or ‘Racism without racists’). But what about the relationship between language and religion when it comes to exclusion in multicultural societies characterized by linguistic and religious pluralism? How is linguistic and religious difference related to social inequality?

A recent article by the sociologist Rogers Brubaker offers a framework for thinking systematically about the ways in which linguistic and religious difference structure inequality in contemporary liberal democracies. The author identifies four domains where difference may be turned into inequality: the political and institutional domain; the economic domain; the cultural and symbolic domain; and the domain of informal social relationships.

In the political and institutional domain language is inescapable but modern liberal states are relatively neutral vis-à-vis religion. In fact, religious discrimination is widely prohibited where linguistic discrimination is seen as perfectly legitimate. Think, for instance, of citizenship testing: many liberal democracies require a language test in the national language as a precondition of naturalization while no similar religious tests currently exist in liberal democracies; and would widely be considered abhorrent.

Furthermore, in addition to explicit linguistic discrimination in favor of the national language(s), there is the inescapable fact that institutions operate exclusively in one language (or in some cases a small set of legitimate languages): this constitutes, eo ipso, a massive advantage for speakers of the institutional language and a massive disadvantage for people who do not speak the institutional language or do not speak it well.

In the economic domain similar considerations apply: proficiency in the language in which an economic activity occurs is a precondition for participation in that economic activity in a way that religion is not. Speakers of an economically powerful language enjoy an economic advantage because they do not have to invest in learning that language. Furthermore, language learning is a complex – and hence costly – undertaking that may make it difficult to acquire the kind of linguistic proficiency that has high economic value. By contrast, membership in a powerful religion is usually not as directly economically useful as language proficiency is. Furthermore, joining a powerful religion requires a smaller investment. For instance, it is much easier for a non-Christian to convert to Christianity than it is for a non-native speaker of English to acquire high-level proficiency in English.

The cultural and symbolic domain works differently. This domain includes all the discursive and symbolic processes through which respect, prestige, honor – in short symbolic value – is conferred. Here, language is less affected than religion because the “content” of a language is much thinner than that of a religion. That means that negative stereotypes about language tend to be relatively mild in comparison to negative stereotypes about religion. While many people object to the specific tenets of a particular religion, very few people object to the specific grammatical structures or means of expression of a particular language. For instance, the widespread stigmatization of Islam in contemporary media discourses simply has no equivalent in negative stereotypes about any language.

Informal social relationships also have a significant bearing on inequality, and can work through exclusion and through inclusion. Processes of social exclusion may disadvantage members of certain religions or speakers of certain languages. Examples include differential treatment of minorities on the rental market or attacks against minorities on public transport. Both members of religious minorities and speakers of minority languages are vulnerable to such “everyday exclusions.” Of course, a language may be stereotypically associated with a particular religion – as is the case with Arabic and Islam – and in such cases it is impossible to disentangle language and religion as the immediate cause of an experience such as that of Mr Al-Ansari anyways.

Informal social relationships also mediate inequality through inclusion in that social circles tend to form around shared identities; and social networks, friendship circles or marriage opportunities are often based on shared identities. Again, religion and language work differently here. Preferences for religion-internal networks is dogma in some religions while preferences for the formation of language-internal networks tend to be much weaker.

In sum, linguistic and religious difference both translate into social inequality in diverse societies but they do so in clearly distinct ways:

The major sources of religious inequality derive from religion’s thicker cultural, normative and political content, while the major sources of linguistic inequality come from the pervasiveness of language and from the increasingly and inescapably ‘languaged’ nature of political, economic and cultural life in the modern world. (Brubaker 2014, p. 23)

Brubaker, R. (2014). Linguistic and Religious Pluralism: Between Difference and Inequality Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 41 (1), 3-32 DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2014.925391

Speak English, people! says British politician Ed Miliband (Source: msn.com)

Every ten years the UK government conducts a census, which every British resident is obliged by law to take part in. The last one happened in 2011, and the results are now in the process of being released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The 2011 census contained a section on language. Respondents were asked to name their main language, and those who named a language other than English or Welsh were also asked to indicate how well they spoke English—very well, well, not well, or not at all. This question about English proficiency had not been asked before, and its inclusion was a sign of the political times. In the last few years, politicians have become obsessed with promoting the English language as a symbol of ‘Britishness’. All the mainstream political parties now deploy a kind of rhetoric in which speaking English is a patriotic duty, while not speaking it is a threat to national unity and ‘social cohesion’.

In many countries this sort of rhetoric has a long history, but in Britain, for various reasons, it does not. For one thing, the modern UK is a union of four historic nations: there is no single British national identity, and no single language that all Britons have always spoken. English only became the majority language of some parts of the UK in the 20^th century, and it has never been given ‘official’ status in law. Nor, until recently, has its status featured prominently on the mainstream political agenda. The only politicians who consistently raised the subject were representatives of the Celtic nationalist parties, whose concern was not the status of English but the rights of Britain’s Welsh and Gaelic-speaking minorities. Elsewhere in British politics, the feeling was quite strong that what languages people spoke was not the business of the state.

But around the turn of the millennium this began to change. Two main developments prompted the shift: on one hand, increasing popular concern about rising numbers of immigrants, and on the other, increasing anxiety about the threat of radical Islam. This was seen not only as an external threat, but also as an internal one, especially after the ‘7/7’ bombings that killed more than 50 people in London in July 2005. Unlike the 9/11 attackers in the US, the 7/7 bombers were native rather than foreign: most were of Pakistani ancestry, but they were born and bred in Britain. Attention began to focus on the problem of the ‘home grown terrorist’, prototypically imagined as a young male Muslim who had been radicalized because he wasn’t properly integrated into British society.

In 2006, in response to these concerns, the Labour administration created a new department for ‘communities and local government’, whose remit included responsibility for promoting better integration or ‘social cohesion’. It soon became clear that what this actually meant was attacking the ideology of multiculturalism, and removing whatever structures had supported it in practice. And multilingualism, the linguistic correlate of multiculturalism, was one of the easiest and most obvious targets.

In 2008, after a security report announced that multiculturalism was making Britain ‘a soft touch for terrorists’, the minister in charge of the department for communities made a speech castigating local councils for translating material into community languages. This, she suggested, was ghettoizing minorities, giving them no incentive to bother learning English, and so preventing them from integrating with the majority. We all knew where that would lead: ultimately, it was implied, it would lead to more suicide bombings on London underground trains. (Though inconveniently for this theory, the 7/7 bombers did speak English like the natives they were; they even left martyrdom videos in Yorkshire-accented English.)

Since 2008, a steady stream of this kind of rhetoric from politicians and in the media has created a new ‘folk devil’: the immigrant, or member of an established minority ethnic group, who doesn’t speak English and can’t be bothered to learn it. This figure is blamed for all kinds of things: for sending non-English-speaking children to school where they will hold the natives’ children back; for demanding translation and interpreting services that cost the taxpayer millions; for putting up signs in shops that make the natives feel excluded; for fragmenting our communities and threatening our security. Our main political parties have vied with each other to whip up anxiety and resentment which they can then address by taking punitive action against linguistic shirkers and freeloaders.

Labour’s main contribution when they were in power was to ‘reform’ the immigration laws to reflect the new importance accorded to speaking English. First they brought in a citizenship test that has to be taken in ‘a recognized British language’ (aka English—in theory you could do it in Welsh or Gaelic, but Home Office statistics suggest that no one ever does), and then they tightened the English language requirements for those needing work or family visas. The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government which came to power in 2010 continued the demonizing process. In 2011, the Tory communities minister Eric Pickles declared it unacceptable for anyone to leave a British school unable to ‘speak English like a native’: young people who fell short of that ideal were making themselves, he said, ‘an unemployable subclass’. Which was rich, considering that unemployment among 16-22 year-olds was running at about 20%–large numbers of young people couldn’t get jobs whatever languages they did or didn’t speak, because there were no jobs.

The Labour Party, now in opposition, has evidently decided that their best strategy is to be even tougher on this issue than the Tories. In December 2012 the party leader Ed Miliband made a speech outlining Labour’s future policy on ‘social integration’. ‘We should start’, he said, ‘with language’. He went on to announce that a future Labour government will cut back further on resources for translation and interpreting, make immigrant parents sign ‘home-school agreements’ underlining their responsibility for ensuring their children speak English, and bring in English proficiency tests for any public sector worker whose job involves talking to members of the public.

Banging on about the importance of English, and the menace of the immigrant who can’t/won’t speak it, is now such a political commonplace, a week scarcely passes without some politician or other making a speech or a comment on the subject. And so far, no one (apart from academics like myself, whose opinions may safely be dismissed as ivory tower nonsense) has challenged the basic presuppositions of this discourse. But the census, whose findings on language were released a couple of weeks ago, has provided what I’m hoping will be some usable ammunition.

If you read about these findings in the media you will probably wonder what I’m talking about, since the reporting was mostly framed by the very presuppositions I’ve just been criticizing. The press and the national TV channels all went with the same story: ‘Polish now Britain’s second language’. In the right wing press, another popular story was ‘22% of households in London contain no one who has English as their main language’. But if you go to the ONS website and take a look at their facts and figures, you may well conclude that the most significant finding is not how many British residents speak Polish, it’s how few of them don’t speak any English.

According to the census data, English in 2011 was the declared main language of 92% of British residents over the age of 3 (around 50 million people). Of the 8% who named another main language, 80% (3.3 million) reported speaking English well or very well. 726,000 said they did speak English but not well, and 138,000 said they spoke no English. The ONS has done the maths: those with limited or no proficiency in English are 1.6% of the British population; those with no proficiency are less than 0.5% of the population. (And that figure must include pre-school children and people who had only just arrived in Britain at the time of the census.)

So, the UK government’s attempt to ascertain the scale of the problem they’ve been talking about incessantly for the past five years has revealed that they’ve been making a mountain out of a molehill—or to put it another way, manufacturing a moral panic. It’s ugly, it’s shameful, and it’s time for it to stop.

In fact, polygamy is not the norm amongst Saudi families. Polygamy is legal in Saudi Arabia, and when it has happened to a student or to someone in one of their families, the students are generally openly upset about it. They describe their anger at their fathers and how they must take care of their depressed mothers and siblings in classroom discussions, and in their writing. Divorce and polygamy seem to cause equal amounts of distress, and while polygamy is socially understood, it is rarely comfortably accepted. Some students have said their families have been totally split apart, and describe what I would, from a Western point of view, consider permanently separated marital status. In these situations, the father doesn’t divorce the first wife – he just lives with the new wife. He may or may not financially support the first wife and his children, and the emotional support has definitely dwindled. This obviously causes a strained relationship with the children, who try to look after their hurting mothers, and thus they often struggle to keep up with their studies. By contrast, I have only seen a few cases where the children are openly OK with the reality of a polygamous father. This is usually the case when the mother is mentally stable and has family support, and the financial support continues to come from the father.

The reality of polygamy is usually something as in the following story, told to me by a student, whose father – in his 60s – decided to marry a young girl from Egypt. The arrangement was made when he simply flew to Egypt, went to a village and paid an acceptable dowry to secure a marriage with a local girl. He came back to Saudi Arabia and to his first wife and children announcing he had remarried and introducing them to his new wife. Needless to say this didn’t go over as well as he had hoped and soon after he moved into an apartment with his new wife. A few years passed and all his children were furious with him and they were all suffering financially as he could not afford to take care of two households much less be there for them emotionally. He had two young children with his new Egyptian wife and was struggling to make ends meet. Soon after the birth of the second child by the Egyptian 2nd wife, she decided to go back to Egypt to visit her family. However, she never returned and the father was left alone with young children to take care of. He begged his first wife to take him back and care for these children who had been abandoned by their mother. While the first wife didn’t take the husband back, she decided she would raise the two kids as her own. My student was not happy with the situation, as she hadn’t been able to go to college due to lack of funds until she obtained a scholarship. She had never forgiven her father and felt ridiculed by her extended family. Furthermore, her father’s polygamy would also impact her chances of getting married negatively. Polygamy is thus a class phenomenon: in a rich family the second marriage might have been more socially acceptable and the impact less painful.

The complexities of polygamy and the hurt it causes Saudi women escape the stereotypes and asking Saudi women how they can live with polygamy is adding insult to injury. As an ESL teacher in Saudi Arabia, I myself have also had to learn to not judge Saudi women and consider the situations in which they find themselves. As an Iranian-American, married to a Saudi myself, I didn’t think it would be too hard to understand and accept the issues that Saudi women face. Getting over stereotypes was thus not a challenge for me as a teacher because I already knew that commonly held stereotypes involve complicated truths. However, questioning students and cultivating critical thinking around social topics has certainly been a challenge. One method has been the development of student ESL blogs, which center round my own, Philosophy Café. The blogs cover student-selected topics such as polygamy but also Islamophobia, co-education, and working women in Saudi Arabia. This provides students with an opportunity to speak out about their concerns while practising their English writing and gives them a chance to explain what they feel needs explaining. Saudi women’s own voices are making a dent in the wall of stereotypes they are facing.

While the report identifies entrenched hostility towards Muslims in contemporary Australia, the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils identifies Muslims as among the most disadvantaged Australians:

[…] one of the most disadvantaged communities in Australia is the Muslim community, many of whom are newly arrived from war ravaged parts of the world, some with little or no English language skills. (p. 72)

Paranoid fear of the religious and linguistic other is nothing new in Australian society, as Robert Hughes explains in The Fatal Shore. In the very first years of the colony, a division between English-speaking Protestants and Gaelic-speaking Catholics emerged where nothing more than having a conversation in Gaelic could become a punishable offense. In 1793, for instance, just five years after the beginning of the European occupation of Australia, two Irishmen, Maurice Fitzgerald and Paddy Galvin, were sentenced to 300 lashes each for nothing more than the following deposition by Hester Stroud, an illiterate English convict:

From what she saw of the Irishmen being in small parties in the Camp of Toongaby and by their walking about together and talking very earnestly in Irish, deponent verily believes they were intent on something improper. (Quoted from The Fatal Shore, p. 188)

Many of the Irish convicts shipped out to Australia in the late 18^th and early 19^th century would not have spoken any other language than Gaelic. As Catholic rebels against the British colonization of Ireland, they were under blanket suspicion in the colony, too. The chief Anglican clergyman of NSW at the time, Samuel Marsden, offered this assessment of Catholics:

Their minds being destitute of every principle of religion and morality render them capable of perpetrating the most nefarious acts in cold blood. As they never appear to reflect upon consequences but to be always alive to rebellion and mischief, they are very dangerous members of society. (ibid, p. 188)

Today Catholics have of course entered the Australian mainstream. In fact, as the AHRC report also shows, Catholics are now the largest denomination in Australia accounting for 25.8% of the population, followed by Anglicans and those without a religion with 18.7% each. The similarity between the paranoid fear of Catholics in the early colony and the contemporary paranoia about Muslims should give us pause to reflect. We’ve come such a long way from the dark days of “the fatal shore” that surely we should be able to learn the lessons of history and overcome the paranoid fear of the supposed strangers in our midst.

Divine linguistic diversity

I’ve spent the past two days convening the first-ever Language-on-the-Move workshop at the University of Tehran. The idea was to explore language contact and multilingualism in the 21^st century, and I learnt as much as the students did. Apart from gaining new insights into multilingualism, language learning and intercultural communication in Iran, I learnt that the fundamentally negative view of linguistic diversity in the Judeo-Christian tradition is not shared by the Quran.

I had brought up the enduring influence of the Tower of Babel myth. Genesis 11 describes multilingualism as divine punishment for human hubris. I had assumed that all the People of the Book shared this negative view of multilingualism. How wrong I was! It turns out that Surah 30:22 actually lists linguistic diversity as one of the signs of God:

And among His Signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the variations in your languages and your colours: verily in that are Signs for those who know.

I’m happy to share this wisdom of the Muslim faith as a Christmas message here on Language-on-the-Move: diversity is divine!

My 88-year-old grandma, my mamanjoon

My 88-year-old grandma, my mamanjoon, is the most wonderful nana anyone could have and I am very close to her. She has played a significant role in my development. Throughout my education, she has always been a great source of support and encouragement. When I crammed for various high-stake national exams, I suffered from anxiety and tension. However, no sooner would I begin to speak with my grandma that all my worries would fade away! The melodious tone of her voice, the words and expressions she uses, would serve to relieve any anxiety or tension. She speaks an old Isfahani dialect which is not only different from the Persian of other parts of Iran but also differs markedly from the speech of younger Isfahanis. In particular, my nana’s speech is characterized by older Isfahani words that are no longer in use and religious terms borrowed from Arabic. Whatever she says bears a spiritual connotation which is sweet, encouraging and uplifting. Yet, her dialect can no longer be heard in the streets of modern Isfahan. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why she feels alienated as she walks in the streets and prefers to stay at home. Her dialect is dying out.

I have often felt saddened by the lack of attempts to preserve the old Isfahani dialect. It goes without saying that, as time passes by, all languages change and that this process cannot be foiled. However, shouldn’t we at least try to record and document this dialect which is so intimately interwoven with our history?

As a professional linguist, I could start by recording the many conversations I have with my grandmother. However, there is a problem! The problem is that my grandmother objects to recordings of any kind for religious reasons. It is only during wedding ceremonies that old women like her can be caught on tape because during these ceremonies the camera nowadays keeps rolling no matter what, and old women have to choose between their objections to being recorded on camera and blessing the newly-wed couple and the next generation. Of course, the latter wins.

Isfahani Muslim women of my grandmother’s generation are not the only ones who object to being audio- or video-recorded. Many traditional peoples around the world have similar objections. This makes me wonder whether saving endangered languages is really all it is cracked up to be. Who are we to disregard the explicit wishes of speakers – people – so that we can “save” a language, which is, after all, nothing more than a set of practices and ideas?